Guidelines For PR Professionals Who Pitch Bloggers

PR professionals often approach bloggers, with decent readership, to talk about the products and services of their clients.

Though most bloggers would love to read PR-pitches about products that are closely related to their niche, irrelevant pitching is always ignored and sometimes met with great frustration.

To save from this frustration, Ogilvy PR team (in consultation with external bloggers) have drafted a "Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics" document that outlines certain essential guidelines for public relations professionals who pitch bloggers. Some excerpts:

1. Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone.

2. If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once. If you don’t respond to us at all, we’ll leave you alone.

3. We won’t pretend to have read your blog if we haven’t, and we’ll make a best effort to spend time reading the blogs we plan on contacting.

4. If we ask you to review a product and, therefore, provide you with the product to enable you to “experience” it, we will ask that you be transparent and reveal that you have been given the product temporarily, or permanently.

5. If we reach out to you with news about a product, campaign or issue, we will not provide monetary compensation, because we believe it is unethical to “buy” favorable reviews and not want to appear as if we are.

You can get the full version of Blogger Outreach code of ethics document from Ogilvy's blog. It's a must-read for all PR companies and marketing professionals who want to maintain a good relationship with bloggers.